Reuben Thomas <r...@sc3d.org> writes: > On 2 October 2012 16:21, John Pratt <jpra...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Basically, Alan Kay is too polite to say what >> we all know to be the case, which is that things >> are far inferior to where they could have been >> if people had listened to what he was saying in the 1970's. > > He's also not very good at dissemination, or doesn't work at it > enough. It's all very well saying "I told you so" when, at least in > the internet age, he's done the equivalent of writing "I told you so" > on a disposable napkin which he then locked in the bottom drawer of a > filing cabinet in a basement room of a condemned building on a locked > site with a sign outside saying "BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD", when he > could've easily put it on an enormous poster on a main street.
I don't think you can say that. He has worked at Apple, where he has done all the evangelizing he could. The iPad is basically the hardware outcome. Hypercard, Dylan, etc as software outcome. There are a lot of developments around Smalltalk and Squeak too. Alice http://www.alice.org/ Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ Croquet http://opencroquet.org/ etc. The problem is not the sources of the message. It's the receiptors. Before 2000, one could give them the excuse that hardware was slow, dynamic programming languages were not good enough to do fancy things. But not since. And indeed, there's more and more dynamic programming languages available (Ruby, Python, etc). Of course those new languages and systems are not refinements, they're just yet another try at the same target, so they don't reach it or even aim any better. Again, the problem is more with the receiptors, who just prefer to reinvent "new" stuff rather than learn history, read old papers and use old programming languages and old systems and refine them. Well, at least, in 2012, C and C++ have closures… Perhaps in 35 years, they'll be sexp-based too! -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
